Tower Of The Dead: A Zombie Novel (4 page)

5

I open the door to the hallway, the low creak of the hinges announcing my presence. The hatchet leads the way for me, blade first. I’m not some great combat strategist; I’ve had no formal training, and have never been much of a fighting man in general. I don’t know the proper way to enter and clear a room. But I’ve gotten this far, so I must be doing something right. I’m not surprised to see that there are bodies spaced up and down the hall, missing various limbs and pieces of flesh; after what I just saw, I don’t think there’s anything that can surprise me at this point. Many of the apartment doors have been kicked in and are hanging from their hinges or are missing altogether. But I don’t see any sign of the sick ones. I don’t hear any groaning or growling either; just distant gunshots and folks yelling somewhere far below me.

“It’s clear, come on.” Tasia steps out behind me, knees cocked, a hand on my shoulder. “Put your back to mine. You watch that end and I’ll watch this one.”

It takes a few tries for us to sync up; I’m going too fast or she’s going too slow, or I get away from her and she starts stumbling backwards, trying to keep her balance. But eventually we get it right and soon we are moving like a couple of pros, covering the angles, speaking in covert whispers.

“You watching the numbers?”

“Yeah.” The door to my left says
1317.

There’s a wet roar and loud footsteps. Tasia screams. I turn to help her but find the attacker already impaled on the end of her blade; she managed to stick him right through the eyeball, first try.

“Nice work, babe. You got this.”

“Yeah…yeah, I got this,” she says between panicked gasps. She twists the blade free and the sick one slides down her legs to the floor.

I hear growling and footsteps again, this time they’re coming for me. I turn, swinging the hatchet blindly. I catch the sick one in the arm. I pull back, leaving the arm dangling by a thin sheet of tissue, just below the elbow. The next blow sinks into its temple; the killing blow. Apparently our noise has stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest; they’re trickling from the open apartments in front and in back of us. 

“Stay close to me.” I reach back and pull Tasia by the tail of her shirt, getting the upper portion of her back good and tight with mine. “We’re gonna keep moving, slow and smart. When they get close, go for the head, don’t panic. You need me, just holler.”

“You do the same.”

My wife has always been a tough woman and I’ve never been happier to have her at my back than I am right now.

I move and she moves, staying right with me. We’re both stabbing and swinging and grunting, downing sick ones left and right as we move steadily towards
1310
. I keep waiting for Tasia to yell for my help, but the only sounds coming out of her are battle cries and profanity.

When we make it to
1310,
there’s a line of bodies behind us and we’re both soaked in a fresh coat of blood. The door for
1310
is still intact and secured. I’m not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing. Every part of my being wants to bust through that flimsy ass wooden rectangle and get my arms around my little girl. But we’ve gotten this far by being smart. One slip up and me and mine could end up with a bullet or a set of teeth buried in our necks.

I put my ear to the door. I can hear what sounds like the drone of a television.

Tasia checks the handle. It’s locked. “Alisa!” Tasia whispers loudly, her lips almost touching the door.

I brace myself, nervous excitement rumbling around inside me, waiting for some type of response.

Nothing.

“Alisa!” Tasia raises her voice slightly. I look back, afraid that the noise may attract more unwelcome visitors.

“Hear anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’re gonna have to break it down, move aside.”

“You think that’s—”

“I think our baby girl might be in there and she might need us. I’m not standing out in this hall anymore.”

She nods her agreement and takes two steps to the right.

I’m no expert on taking down doors, I’ve seen it done on TV a time or two and I’ve heard a couple little hooligans in this building brag about the techniques they use, so I go at it the only way I know how; shoulder first. I’m not a big man, so part of me expects to go tumbling backwards on my ass. But it gives straight away and a few seconds later, I’m standing in the middle of the living room.

There’s no time for celebration. Whatever rush of victory I feel is quickly washed out by a spine tingling chill of terror. There’s blood all over the living room: streaked on the walls, pooled on the carpet, speckled across the face of the television screen. There are signs of struggle everywhere: the couch is tipped over on its back with white swells of stuffing emerging from tears and slits in the fabric, the coffee table is on its side and is missing two legs, the end table by the recliner has been reduced to a pile of splinters.

For a moment, Tasia and me just stand there, frozen, taking in the scene, readjusting our hopes and expectations in light of this new information.

“Oh my god,” Tasia mutters as tears instantly fill her eyes.

I break from my trance and start storming through the apartment, hatchet up. “Alisa!”

Tasia is running behind me, echoing my calls, “Alisa! Alisa! It’s us, baby! It’s safe!”

The kitchen looks just as war torn and the refrigerator door is hanging open. When I get to the hallway leading off the kitchen to the bedrooms, I see them.

The bodies.

I catch myself against a door frame as the world around me momentarily fuzzes out of existence.

I can’t breathe. I can’t scream. I can’t cry.

“What is it? Is it Alisa?” Tasia squeezes past me, sees them, and screams. “No! Oh, please, no!” She doesn’t waver like I do. She charges in, not put off by the corpses and blood.

There are three bodies. Two are adults. One is a kid…a little girl. She’s face down on the carpet. I can’t see what her wounds are. But they are there…somewhere beneath all the mess.

“Don’t let it be her, don’t let it be my baby!” Tasia isn’t concerned with being delicate. She twists the girls’ head in her hands, brushing the hair aside, trying to get a look at the features beneath. After a few seconds, she lets the girl go and collapses against the wall on her butt, breathing heavy and shaking all over. “It’s not her, oh thank you Jesus, it’s not her.”

I feel the same relief, but the fact remains that we still haven’t found her. “Come on, get up. We don’t got time to relax.”

“I’m not relaxing, I just need a minute.”

“We don’t have—”

Something starts bumping around in the room at the end of the hall; it’s enough to bring Tasia back up to her feet. “Alisa, honey, is that you? You’re safe, baby.”

I beat Tasia to the door, my hand on the knob, hatchet raised. “Alisa, we’re coming in.” I turn the handle and let go, swinging the door open with my foot, keeping my hands free to defend myself against whatever horror may be waiting to greet me.

The room is empty except for a set of bloody footprints embedded in the carpet. They lead straight for a small closet on the other side of the bed. “Alisa, honey, it’s your dad.” The folding door is decorated with stickers: sparkling images of shooting stars and glowing planets. I approach slowly, careful to avoid the fresh line of footprints.

I’m not feeling anything close to hope. It’s all darkness and dread.

If my girl is on the other side of these doors then why hasn’t she called out to me?

Nah, something more sinister awaits and I’m ready for it. After everything I’ve seen today, you bet your ass I’m ready for it.

“Tasia, get the lights.”

There’s the small plastic click of the switch flipping and the exposed bulb above my head flickers to life, bathing the small world around me in a sickly yellow.

I steady my nerves, ready my weapon, and yank the door back.

It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust, even with the assistance of the light behind me, the closet is still cloaked by shadows from the hanging clothes. But behind all of it I see an outline balled in the corner, moving…shaking. Despite the figure doing everything in its power to disappear into the shadows, the tip of a sneaker slips into the light; white with pink spots.

Alisa’s sneaker.

“Alisa, it’s me! It’s your dad! You’re safe!”

“Oh, Alisa, baby!” Tasia starts charging in.

I hold my arm up, stopping her.

“You don’t have to be scared anymore.” I drop the hatchet and extend my hands. “Come on, it’s okay.”

Alisa pulls further away from me. “I killed her,” her voice is flat, void of all emotion.

“We all killed people today, sweetie. Your mom and me both killed people; we had to, to save you, to save ourselves.”

“It was Rhonda,” her voice cracks as she says her friend’s name, “she wasn’t a person. She was something else.”

“People are getting sick. And the sickness, whatever it is, it changes them; it makes them want to hurt people. You did what you had to.”

Now she’s crying.

I want to see her, to pull her from the shadows and comfort her. But I have to calm her down first. She’s been through enough trauma. This has to be on her time.

“I came out of the kitchen and…she was…” the words get caught in her throat.

“It’s okay; you don’t have to tell me.”

“I’d gone to the kitchen because Rhonda said she wanted juice. Then I heard all this banging in the hall and I heard her parents and they were just screaming their heads off. So I thought Rhonda had gotten hurt or something. I ran around the corner and Rhonda was biting them on their stomachs and legs…but it didn’t look like Rhonda…her skin and her eyes—”

“It’s the sickness, sweetie.”

“I went back in the kitchen and I tried to call you guys but the phone wasn’t working. I was scared she was gonna get me next so I got a knife, a big one like the one mom has, and I started to run for the door cause I was gonna run home and find ya’ll. But when I opened the door, everyone was just…they was losing their minds. A couple of them were doing the same thing as Rhonda; just biting on people. So I came back in and locked the door. I didn’t know where to go.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry your mom and me couldn’t get here sooner.”

“The screaming had stopped and I thought maybe everything was okay. So I went to check on Rhonda and her parents. But…Rhonda…she was just eating on them. I felt like I had to help them. All I had was the knife.” She’s crying so hard that she’s struggling to catch her breath.

“It’s okay, we’re here now.”

“Her parents…after Rhonda wasn’t hurting them no more…they came back to life. I…didn’t…I didn’t mean to hurt them, Dad.  I didn’t mean to.”

“Come here, it's okay.”

She pulls away. “You don’t want to see me.”

“Yes I do, we’re not mad at you.”

“No…Dad…you don’t want to see me.”

“Alisa, come here, now.” I’m not loud, but I’m firm.

She scoots forward, the light exposing her bit by bit: legs, torso, head.

It takes everything in me to not let my emotions show, but I’m absolutely horrified.

Tasia loses it. “Oh my god! My baby! What happened? What happened?”

Alisa starts crying harder because of Tasia’s reaction and attempts to retreat back to the shadows.

I grab her by the shoulders and hold her still while scanning her for wounds. “Are you hurt? Did you get bit?”

She shakes her head, the tears mixing with the blood on her face. “It’s all theirs, it’s not mine.”

“Tasia, go get some wet paper towels from the kitchen.”

“Is she—”

“Tasia! Paper towels!”

She rushes from the room, still a ball of emotion.

“It’s alright. You hear me? It’s alright. We’re gonna get you cleaned up and then we’re gonna get out of here. You believe me?”

She nods.

Tasia is back with the paper towels. She hands me a thick stack and has another stack for herself.

We begin wiping down Alisa. She takes one side of her face and I take the other. She takes one arm and I take the other. We go like that until we’ve cleaned every exposed piece of skin.

Tasia throws the soiled paper towels aside and hugs Alisa to her chest, kissing the top of her head.

“Feel a little better?” I ask.

She nods, her chin still trembling.

The building quakes with another explosion.

Alisa spooks and grips Tasia tighter.

“That’s our signal to leave.”

Tasia scoops Alisa up and follows me back into the living room.

The scene playing out on the television grabs my attention.

‘The military is pushing us back from the barricades now; they’re saying it’s for our own protection.’
The ashen-haired female reporter with the thick eye makeup slides in and out of frame as the man holding the camera turns circles, getting brief shots of the line of heavily armed soldiers forcing them to move.
‘Beyond that, they’re not saying much else. As you can see, they’re being quite hostile. We’ve seen the explosions. We’ve seen them firing on unarmed civilians. We’ve seen the bodies in the streets. The reason given to us has been brief and vague, to say the least. All they’re telling us is that people are sick, highly contagious, and that they’ve been acting out violently. Again, I want to reiterate that everything we’ve heard is, at this point, speculation.’
She stops moving and brings two fingers up to her ear piece.
‘We’re getting word now from one of our sources that the military may be planning to conduct air strikes. That may explain why they’re pushing us back, but at this point, we just don’t know. But again, word is coming in that they may be planning to launch an air strike of some sort on this neighborhood.’